Dr No ... Ursula Andress (with Sean Connery) comes out of our romantic, adolescent dreams rather than the pages of Playboy. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

Someone once said that the best Raymond Chandler novel is the first one you read, because between the debut of Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939) and his last significant appearance in The Long Good-bye (1953), the books are pretty even in quality and there's nothing quite like the initial impact of Chandler's style, Marlowe's company and their colourful southern California locale. The same is not true of his devoted follower, Ian Fleming, whose first half-dozen James Bond novels are far superior to those that followed – being more realistic, better plotted and altogether less fantastical. Casino Royale is arguably his best book, and when eventually it was filmed with Daniel Craig in 2006 (there had been a sad, jokey, non-canonical version in 1967), it was unquestionably the closest the movie series has come to capturing the spirit of Fleming's early work.

The producers of the Bond movies chose to start off with the sixth novel, Dr No, at which point the tales had become increasingly baroque and the villains flamboyantly megalomaniacal. Looking back to 1962, I recall a discussion of Dr No on The Critics, the weekly arts programme I then produced, which attracted an audience of several million on the BBC's Home Service (now Radio 4). The chairman that week was the tweedy middle-aged novelist and critic Walter Allen, and at one point the youngest of the six participants, the playwright John Bowen, intervened, saying: "I think you're all being rather patronising." There was the slightest pause before Allen retorted with a sigh, "Well, if you can't patronise Ian Fleming, who can you patronise?" It was a view I rather agreed with at the time, and for some years afterwards.

Fifty years later, however – having seen all the Bond pictures and reviewed most of them – I'm inclined for several reasons, to like Dr No far more than any of its successors, though as I've suggested, I think Casino Royale is the best.

The first reason is that the Bond series was not then a franchise (a term that was not to be applied to the cinema for decades to come). Nor was it an institution, or a curious, outdated source of national pride, or an embarrassingly archaic badge of national pride, of a Britain continuing to punch above its weight on the international scene. Dr No is a modest thriller with a tough, stylish hero of some charm doing his job without the assistance of elaborate ordnance or eye-popping gadgetry. He pursues women, but doesn't attract them as if he possessed some magical power or irresistible magnetism. In his first star role, Sean Connery is confident but not arrogant, a man comfortable in a dinner jacket but not born to the purple. Like Albert Finney and Peter O'Toole, whose careers took off at much the same time, he's a harbinger of a major social change in class, fashion and behaviour that seemed attractive at the time and was later to take less likable forms.

'Sean Connery is confident but not arrogant' … a scene from Dr No. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/United Artists

Most of what were to be standard ingredients in the series are here at the start – the opening credits with the familiar Bond theme accompanying the hero shooting straight into the camera lens, the outlandish villain with his plans of world domination, the Bond girls to be bedded and left to their fates, the cynical quips that accompany the deaths of foes and so on. But they are freshly hatched, unselfconscious, curiously innocent, less knowing, not yet stamped with copyright signs declaring their proprietary nature. Ursula Andress comes out of our romantic, adolescent dreams rather than the pages of Playboy.

Ken Adam, one of the greatest production designers in the history of cinema, establishes himself here as of equal importance to the Bond project as the director (here Terence Young, a film-maker of the second or third rank) and the screenwriters (Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, Berkely Mather, only the first of whom has other credits of note). But he does so with the lightest, most imaginative touches. On a very small budget he creates the distinctive set for the lair of the Bond villain on Crab Key that will define his character for years to come – high-tech in its futuristic, scientific working area; Renaissance-princely in its domestic aspect.

'Ken Adam: one of the greatest production designers in the history of cinema' … Dr No's secret base. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection

One of Adam's finest achievements is the anteroom where the weakly sinister Professor Dent (played by Anthony Dawson, famously the unintentional victim of Grace Kelly's scissors in Dial M for Murder) is given a lethal tarantula by an unseen Dr No. It was run up on a shoestring. It would take the War Room in Dr Strangelove, Goldfinger's rumpus room and the interior of Fort Knox to thrust Adam into the limelight.

But other things make Dr No affectionately memorable, two in particular. The first is our introduction to Bond at the gaming tables of the then fashionable nightclub Les Ambassadeurs in London, handling cards, lighting a cigarette and then telling us his name: "Bond, James Bond". The other is a scene, improvised on the set, when Bond does a double take on seeing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington (recently stolen from London's National Gallery) in Dr No's palatial living room. It's the funniest moment in any Bond picture and one of cinema's great art jokes.